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As regular readers of this site will probably know, I recently finished posting a series of 1980s-style cyberpunk paintings of real locations. Anyway, when I was making these paintings, I made sure to make a scan of the line art for each picture before I started painting.

Well, I’d originally written an opinion article for today, but I worried that it was “too political” or “too cynical”. Plus, given the lead times on these articles, the controversy that I’d written about is well and truly old news by now.

So, I decided to post a gallery of NEVER SEEN BEFORE “work in progress” line art – both past and future (well, mostly future – many of the full versions of the paintings featured here won’t appear here until 2017) – instead. Enjoy 🙂

You can click on each picture to see a larger version, if they’re too small here.

As regular readers of this site know, I tend to write these articles quite far in advance of publication. As such, I’d originally planned to post an article about the “making of” a political cartoon I’d made – but not posted– a few months before the EU Referendum (I eventually ended up posting this last-minute webcomic mini series just before the referendum instead).

But, the day before this article was scheduled to be published, I worried that it might be “too political” or that it would come across as strangely irrelevant, given that the referendum has long since happened.

So, instead, here’s a gallery of some exclusive “never seen before” artwork (at least I think it’s never seen before, I’m not quite sure if the “Garden Corner” painting has turned up in another one of these last-minute posts. I don’t think it has, but I can’t be certain).

Anyway, enjoy 🙂

This is a digitally-edited painting called “Abstraction Corridor” that I salvaged from a failed painting I’d planned to schedule for next year. Luckily, I had to move some scheduled/drafted paintings around and saw an opportunity to remove this painting from the “official” line up of scheduled paintings.

This is a panel from an abandoned gamebook-style horror comic project that I’d planned to make for Halloween (to run concurrently with the zombie comic that should appear then). But, the project failed quickly for a number of reasons. Still, I quite like the first two panels.

This was a painting called “Garden Corner” which was originally going to be the first painting to appear here next year. It didn’t really seem cool enough to start the New Year with, so I replaced it with something else.

This is a painting called “Dark Knight” which ended up being removed from my art schedule for next year. At the time, I didn’t really think that it was good enough but, looking at it again, it actually seems ok.

This is a sci-fi painting called “Above The City” which was also supposed to appear next year, but I ended up removing it from the art schedule since it didn’t really turn out as well as I’d hoped.

But, as long as you’ve got a digital camera and/or a scanner, and an image editing program (if you don’t have one, you can download a freeware open source image editing program called “GIMP” here), then you can at least have a better digital copy of your failed painting if you’re prepared to edit it.

Just remember that, if you’re planning to sell your art, then the digital image of it that you post online should be an accurate representation of the original painting or drawing. But, if you’re not selling it, then feel free to edit away to your heart’s content.

Although I use a combination of an ancient 1990s version of Paint Shop Pro, GIMP 2.6 and/or MS Paint 5.1 for my image editing, most image editing programs share a few basic features.

So, it doesn’t really matter which programs you use. I’ll try to write these instructions as generally as possible, so that they’ll be useful regardless of which image editing program you use.

I should probably also point out that the three tips in this article are extremely basic. So, if you already know a little bit about image editing, then you probably won’t learn anything new here.

1) Your picture looks too faded: One problem with scanned or digitally photographed paintings or drawings is that they often look slightly faded.

An easy way to remedy this in pretty much any image editing program is to look for an option (it’s probably in the “colours” menu) labelled “Brightness/ Contrast”. Once you’ve found it, all you have to do is to lower the brightness level slightly and raise the contrast level until your picture looks right.

Personally, I usually tend to use a fairly low brightness level and a fairly high contrast level, because it gives my art a “vivid” look – but just experiment until your picture looks right.

Once you’ve done this, then just cut the image to the proper size (eg: if there’s other stuff in the background of your digital photo etc..) using the cropping tool in your program ( In GIMP 2.6, the icon for this tool looks a bit like a scalpel. In other programs, it often looks like a square made from two overlapping “L” shapes).

2) You’ve messed up the colour scheme: If you’ve messed up the colour scheme in part of or all of your painting, then all is not lost. In fact, there are several things that you can do to create a better digital copy of your artwork:

– Hue/Saturation: Select the parts of your picture that are the wrong colour (or don’t select anything, if you have problems with the whole image), then look for this option in your image editing program (it’ll probably be in the “colours” menu).

Once you’ve found it, just move the “hue” slider until the selected area is the right colour. This will probably require a bit of trial and error, but you can change the colour of pretty much anything (except for solid black and white areas) using this.

– RGB values: Another way to change the colour of a selected area of your artwork is to look for the “RGB” options in the colour menu of your image editing program. This allows you to alter the amount of red, green and blue in the selected area. This is less precise than altering the hue levels, but it can be useful if you need to add colour to a solid white area of your artwork.

– The Nuclear Option: If your problem can’t be solved with either of these two things, then you can remove all colour from your picture by either looking for a “greyscale”/”desaturate” option in the colour menu of your editing program, or by opening the “Hue/ Saturation” menu and reducing the saturation to zero.

Once you’ve done this, then you can mess around with the RGB options (or look for a “colourise” option) to give your artwork a tint if you want to.

In fact, I actually did this with one of my failed paintings from late April (in addition to using a “blur” effect too) after I messed up the colours in it fairly significantly. This is what the final picture looked like:

“Let The Rain Fall” By C. A. Brown

3) Correcting small mistakes (in a less noticeable way): I usually tend to do this in a fairly basic program like MS Paint, but you can do this in any image editing program.

The main thing to remember when correcting small mistakes is that the exact colours in your painting are different from the basic stock colours that are available in the menu of your image editing program.

If you use the stock colours (or try to create a similar colour using a custom colour menu), then your corrections will stand out from a mile away.

So, before you correct small mistakes, look for a colour selection tool first.

In MS Paint 5.1 this is called the “Pick Color” tool and the icon for it looks like a pipette/ dropper. In GIMP 2.6, it’s called the “Colour Picker Tool” and the icon also looks like a pipette/ dropper. Virtually all image editing programs contain this tool, so you should be able to find it.

So, what does this tool do? Well, once you’ve selected it, just click on any part of your painting and the brush/ airbrush/ pencil colour will change to the exact colour of the area that you’ve just clicked on. This means that you can seamlessly alter a part of your painting using the exact colours that are in this part of your painting.

Yes, your corrections will still be noticeable if people know what to look for, but they won’t be extremely obvious at first glance.

Although this is an article about compositions and backgrounds in art, I’m going to have to start by talking about my recent cyberpunk art series (again) for a while because it provides an example of what I’ll be talking about.

Anyway, here’s a cyberpunk painting that I made the night before writing this article:

“Blue Light Lab” By C. A. Brown

And here’s another painting from the series. You can probably see the obvious difference:

“Strange Case” By C. A. Brown

Yes, there’s no background! Whilst virtually all of the paintings in the series have large detailed cityscapes and/or rooms in the background, this one painting doesn’t.

Why was that? Well, it was to do with the fact that adding a background would have completely ruined the painting. If you don’t believe me, then just take a look at the original line art for the painting and you’ll see a couple of my failed attempts at adding a background.

“Blue Light Lab (Lineart)” By C. A. Brown

Because my original idea for the painting was to have the entire picture lit by a glowing blue orb, I quickly realised that this would probably only illuminate things close to the light source. Although I later added orange light to the painting too (to compliment and contrast with the blue light), I realised that the low light levels in the picture would be great for emphasising just one part of the painting.

As such, I had to leave the background out – since it would have distracted from the more interesting parts of the picture and it would have also ruined the gloomy atmosphere of the painting too.

But, when shouldn’t you include backgrounds in your art?

Generally speaking, if you want to emphasise something you’ve drawn or painted- then the easiest way to do that is not to include a background. Likewise, if you have a limited amount of time to work on a piece of art, then the background can often be the first thing to go in order to save time.

In situations where a background would be expected, an easy way to get around this is to – if possible – use a solid colour background, rather than just leaving the background blank (personally, I like to paint it black – but you can use any colour that compliments the rest of your picture). This gives the impression of a background, without actually including a detailed background.

As for learning when it’s right to include backgrounds and when it isn’t, the only real way to learn this is through trial and error. Of course, since every drawing or painting is different, you can only learn a few general guidelines rather than a specific “one size fits all” rule.

But, this isn’t as bad as it sounds – if you’re more of a traditional artist, then just experiment with backgrounds in your preliminary pencil sketches (they can be easily erased). If you also work digitally, then backgrounds can always be added or erased later (although it’s obviously much easier to erase a background – I mean, you can do this in MS Paint – than it is to add one digitally).

Earlier this month and back in late December, I posted a series of retro cyberpunk-themed paintings here. Anyway, when I was making all of these paintings – I also scanned them when they were unfinished (initially, I did this for one or two “art preview” posts for last autumn and then I decided to do it for the whole series for some reason).

So, since I was kind of tired when I made today’s post, I thought that I’d show of all of my old “work in progress” lineart from this series. Enjoy 🙂

“These Awesome Relics (Edited Lineart)” By C. A. Brown

“Roboforensics (Lineart)” By C. A. Brown

“The Abandoned Centre (Lineart)” By C. A. Brown

“And The Duellists Fought (Lineart)” By C. A. Brown

“Market Row (Lineart)” By C. A. Brown

“Running From Time (Lineart)” By C. A. Brown

“Escalator 17 (Lineart)” By C. A. Brown

“Junkers (Lineart)” By C. A. Brown

“Now THIS Is A Computer! (Lineart)” By C. A. Brown

“Skeletal Terror Over District 76 ( Lineart)” By C. A. Brown

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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂 Hopefully, I’ll write a proper article or review for tomorrow 🙂